


When the Feeling Talks

by Halfblood_Fiend



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awkward Romance, Awkward Vison, F/M, Fluff, Fluff brought on by the movie, OC shennaigans, Slight spoilers, drabbles for my amusement, slight AU, the Vision creepin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 08:47:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3890005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halfblood_Fiend/pseuds/Halfblood_Fiend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There it was again.<br/>That same strange feeling Jessica Rogers had sometimes.<br/>It came again while she worked late in the lab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Feeling Talks

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slight AU where Steve and Peggy were really together before he went down into the ice. They had a son, who in turn had his own family, and Jessica Rogers is one of his daughters, Steve's granddaughter. A granddaughter who is technically older than him. Awkward.  
> Also, they're in a world where the Avengers didn't immediately move from Avenger's Tower after the events of AoU.
> 
> Lastly, there are slight spoilers. It's best to save this for later if you haven't seen AoU yet.

I had a feeling.

It nagged and twisted my stomach. It caused butterflies and shallow breathing. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It made my skin erupt in goosebumps.

It came unexpectedly.

I felt it while I teetered just on the cusp of sleep. It came to me while I worked in my lab. It happened as I walked in the hallways.

I always looked.

I stopped what I was doing to search, but there was never anything there.

Just a feeling.

A feeling of being watched, of no longer being alone. Suddenly there, and then suddenly gone.

After so long of feeling ignored and isolated, I wasn’t sure if this was an improvement. It made me feel uneasy yet inexplicably safe even during my late nights. I was beginning to believe that being cooped in the tower was taking its toll. Tireless days staring down microscope lenses and looking over papers was driving me crazy. So crazy that I was creating fleeting figments of my imagination to fill my anxiety-ridden moments in the pressing quiet. Restless. Worried. Secluded. This was my world since I got here and it was eating me from the inside out.  All I needed was to get outside, to go out.

If only my grandfather would let me out. He was protective. He was uncertain. So instead, I did research. Ceaselessly working out projects I could publish. I’ve done more work in a month than I have even done in two years of getting my Masters.

Going out wasn’t worth the trouble, the lectures, the guards.

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Instead of communicate with other human beings, I stayed here. Working. Ignoring odd feelings, dismissing them as my imagination.

Until the feeling spoke.

“You are not using the eyepieces at their optimum settings.”

I jumped from my chair and uttered a sharp cry.

“My apologies,” the Vison said meekly, his golden cape billowing softly around him as he floated to the ground. He stood out brilliantly beneath the bright floodlights of the lab. The green and gold of his costume was stark against silver instruments and black tables. His scarlet face commanded all attention, blue positronic eyes sparking with polite curiosity. “You have been using the automatic lens adjustment for the eyepieces ever since Mr. Stark had created them for you, but these are only suggested. The automatic settings have been standardized from an average census of the population. You are different. These are no longer the optimum settings for _your_ particular usage.” The air seemed to ripple with his accented words and he paused for long moments waiting expectantly for me to respond.

I was barely recovering from my fright. My mouth moved uselessly and my eyebrows knit of their own accord.

Vision teetered uncertainly as he watched me struggle to regain my speech. “I-I could calibrate it for you, should you like?”

My head was shaking and he paused looking somewhat crestfallen. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I clarified.

“Oh.” He perked up. “Allow me to demonstrate, Miss. Rogers.”

“Please… It’s just Jessica.”

A pause. “I shall remember that… Jessica.” He said it slowly, as if savoring the taste of the peculiar arrangement of letters of my name. It rolled off his tongue in a way that made me shiver. My reaction confused me. He bent over the microscope and pulled out the touch interfacing system. I realized that in order to do that, he had to have my passcode… which I never shared.

“Wait,” I found myself saying.

Worried eyes met mine, fingers poised over the system.

My forehead creased as I tried to shake the weird feeling that was stealing my brain’s functionality from me. “Did…Did you say that I’ve been using the auto adjustment ever since Tony gave me those things?”

“Yes.”

I struggled again. “But…wasn’t that… _three_ _weeks_ ago?”

“Yes.”

“How would you know that I’ve been using them that way for three weeks?”

“I check in on you from time to time.” His hands fidgeted at his sides.

“When? I’ve never seen you.”

He looked away and busied himself with the access pad. “I have only recently noticed your discomfort and have correlated it with your prolonged use of the microscope at these settings. This should ease the strain on your eyes and reduce your headaches.”

“ _And you know my code?”_

“I did not want for you to be alarmed…” he said softly, refusing to meet my gaze again.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “You don’t see a problem with this?”

“I…”

Thinking back to all the times I felt someone watching, all the times when my stomach knotted with nerves I couldn’t explain, it all clicked.

“You’ve been stalking me, haven’t you?”

Vision stood rigidly straight and looked at me, shock and hurt clear in his mechanical features. “N-no! That was not my intention at all—”

“But it’s what you were doing wasn’t it?”

“I… I did not mean to—”

“ _But you did_.”

He bowed his head and sighed. “My sincere apologies, Jessica. I did not mean to frighten or offend you and yet I have unwittingly done both. Allow me to finish so you will be more comfortable and then I will leave you. I will not trouble you again.”

Without waiting for my response, he set back to work quickly, fingers flying across the interface in impossible blurs.

“Complete. I hope it helps you.”

Never making eye contact with me again, he raised his arms and his body raised with him, headed towards the ceiling. He would phase through it and leave me just like he had promised.

Leave me alone.

“You-you can stay… Actually.”

Vision looked down at me, his expression hopeful.

I tugged at my collar beneath his gaze. “I-I mean, if you really want. I bet you have tons of better Avenger-y things to do though….”

“Not at all,” he said brightly. “In fact, I enjoy watching you work.” He touched back down on the ground and looked at me expectantly.

With an awkward laugh, I returned to my chair. “Why? Because I make myself look stupid?”

“No. You are meticulous. You attend every detail with careful precision. You look over other’s work critically, nothing is at face value.” He answered my questioning expression with a meek smile. “It is something I have seldom seen in human behavior.”

I rolled my eyes. “Because you’re an expert, Mr. I’ve-Only-Been-Alive-For-A-Month.”

“I have infinite resources of my own.”

“But none on non-creepy behavior, apparently.”

His eyebrows knit together with uncertainty. “Creepy?” he asked in the sort of voice that made me want to give him a hug to make him feel better. “That was not what I wanted at all.”

I grunted noncommittally and pressed my eyes back into the microscope’s eye pieces. They focused immediately on the sand grains on my slide. No adjustments necessary, no dizzy spinning, no furious blinking as I willed my eyes to focus. It was just as Vision had said. I was using the microscope wrong this whole time. Amazed, I made a note to read instruction manuals when Tony gives them to me.

“So what was it you wanted then?” I asked conversationally as I nudged quarts grains aside with my long precision tweezers.

“I wanted for you to be flattered. I wanted to dispel your feelings of loneliness and abandonment. I understand them all too well. I would never wish them on another being,” he answered softly.

I looked at him to assure myself that I really had heard the sincerity of his words, his own feelings mirroring my own. But that didn’t make sense. He was only an AI, a robot created by Ultron and given a working program by Tony. How could he feel the same way as me? How could he understand how useless I felt or what a burden I was when he ran around wielding Thor’s hammer and destroying Ultron and saving the world? All while I…sat here. Waiting. I wasn’t entirely sure Vison could feel anything let alone the emotional rollercoaster I was riding on. Could he really know? _Really?_

“I guess… it’s tough being the newbie, isn’t it?” I asked him quietly for lack of much else to say.

“Indeed.”

After a few somewhat awkward minutes, I said, “Thank you for fixing my microscope.”

“My pleasure.” He smiled sweetly and I had to look away. I was probably already blushing. It felt pretty warm in the lab suddenly.

I returned to sifting through sand grains. “You know, I used to talk to you a lot. Or—uh—that was technically Jarvis, wasn’t it?” I chuckled. “My bad. But I miss those conversations. It’s been really quiet around here.”

“Yes,” Vision chuckled fondly. “I remember them.”

“You do?”

“Of course.”

“Oh gosh…” I was definitely blushing hard now.

“Would you like for me to recite something for you again, Jessica? So that you can listen to my voice?” he teased.

“N-n-no, Vision. It’s fine. Y-you can just… You can just do whatever you want, okay?”

I heard the Vison’s low chuckle. “Hmm. Where were we…? Ah, yes.

“ _I believe that on that first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there_ ….”


End file.
